Today Amazon introduced #AmazonCart, a new hashtag that lets Twitter users add potential purchases to their Amazon shopping cart with a tweet.
The new feature requires you to connect your Twitter account to Amazon. Then, when you see someone tweet out a link to an Amazon product, you can simply reply with the #AmazonCart hashtag (#AmazonBasket in the UK), and the linked product will appear in your online shopping cart.
Unfortunately, #AmazonCart doesn’t actually simplify the buying process. It’s mostly a way to bookmark an item you want to purchase later. You still have to log in to Amazon to complete the purchase; using the hashtag doesn’t commit you to an impulse buy. And since Twitter is public, anyone can see what you’ve added to your shopping cart.
While this sort of deal might seem to bring Twitter one step closer to pulling in the e-commerce big bucks, the social network doesn’t actually make any money from sales that started with #AmazonCart, as Recode notes.
It’s also not clear that similar deals have done much for Twitter in the past. American Express and Starbucks have both tried to get customers to use Twitter hashtags and spend money. Neither program has really taken off. While Starbucks boasted about $180,000 in sales in the first three months of the #tweetacoffee campaign, a cursory Twitter search shows just a handful of tweets in the last few weeks.
Image via Amazon
